 | Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans Subjects: United States -- History -- 1783–1865; United States -- Social conditions -- To 1865; United States -- History -- Revolution 1775–1783 -- Influence; An esteemed historian of early America, Appleby (UCLA) has written a social history of "the first generation of Americans"Änot those who fought the American Revolution but, as her title indicates, those who inherited it, who had to figure out just what their parents' bold declarations of liberty looked like on the ground. Appleby's lens is wide: she investigates religion, business, family life and politics, examining this generation's struggles with slavery, their musings on the proper role of women and their participation in evangelical revivals. One of the more innovative discussions comes in the chapter "Careers," in which Appleby argues that those who came of age after the revolution often earned their daily bread doing tasks their parents could not have imagined. Many continued to farm, of course, but others headed to cities to run businesses, teach school, preach sermons, build buildings, publish books. Indeed, Appleby notes that in the Revolutionary era, the term "career" "denote[d] a horse-racing course"; it was only after 1800 that it was used to describe the trajectory of a person's vocation. Appleby strains to pay attention to the South, but her book betrays a certain Northern biasÄher focus on the development of capitalism and the incursion of the market better describe the industrializing North than the slaveholding South, which, in historian Eugene Genovese's phrase, was in the market, but not of it. But that is a small quibble with a wonderful book, which freshly conveys the energy and creativity unleashed in a generation forging a new national identity. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved Joyce Oldham Appleby was born in Omaha, Nebraska on April 9, 1929. She graduated from Stanford University in 1950. She worked for the Restaurant Reporter, a trade magazine based in Beverly Hills, and later as a stringer for The Star-News, a local South Pasadena newspaper. She received a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. She taught at San Diego State University and at the University of California, Los Angeles. She retired from there in 2001. She wrote several books during her lifetime including Economic Thought and Ideology in 17th Century England, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, and Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination. She died from complications of pneumonia on December 23, 2016 at the age of 87. (Bowker Author Biography) |
